Honorary Professor John Stasko

Dean Dearle, Professor Quigley with Professor StaskoProfessor John Stasko and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been appointed as an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science. This appointment comes following a SICSA distinguished visiting fellowship John was awarded. This fellowship allowed John to participate in the SACHI/Big Data Lab summer school in Big Data Information Visulisation in St Andrews. This industry linked summer school has successful paved the way for a new generation of students to explore Data Science and Information Visualisation.
Professor Stasko at the Big Data Info Vis Summer School 2013
John is a newly elected fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to information visualization, visual analytics and human-computer interaction. Professor Quigley who has known John for the past 14 years and said, “I’m delighted John will join us a honorary Professor here in St Andrews. His world leading research and experience in Information Visualisation will be of great benefit to our staff, students and colleagues across the University. I first met John when I was a PhD student and organiser of a Software Visualisation conference we held in Sydney. Then, as now, his enthusiasm, breath of knowledge and desire to engage and work with others marks him out as a true intellectual thought leader. We hope to see John here regularly in the years ahead and we will be working with him on new projects.”

Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day is an annual event held by communities who are passionate about free and open-source software (FOSS).
The event programme includes a talk by Dr Markus Tauber from the School, titled Expectations, Requirements and Survival when
Starting with Linux.

Markus has provided a short overview of his talk for those interested in attending:
“The talk is about some work I did with friends from an Austrian CS
society as a spare time activity about 2 years ago. We
semi-scientifically looked into the relation of what experts expect
Linux newbies to do when starting with Linux and what newbies expect or
what they are happy to do. The talk is for both, newbies who want to get
some guidelines and for experts to give them an idea about the
expectations of newbies.”

Software Freedom Day will be held on Saturday 17th September from 10am until 5pm in Abertay’s Hannah Maclure Centre. The event is hosted by Abertay’s Open Society in partnership with TayLUG, Dundee’s local Linux user group.